'Hallam always woke up to Verity's footsteps. With shoes on, her short, measured gait ticked like a metronome, past his bedroom door and down the corridor at the end, signalling the start of the day. Sometimes he would jerk awake to what he thought were her ticking heels and find he had been fooled by the bedside clock, which showed the time to be three in the morning. Even then he would like awake and strain his ears listening to the fading echo of what was not there.
But Verity's footsteps went further back. He had the impression that he knew them even before he knew her, in childish dreams made distressing by their formlessness. They were not steps then, but the sensation was the same. It might be surrounding noise that grew to an almost unbearable volume before fading again. Or once, he recalled, the colour red absorbing the greyness of a space without context, inducing panic as it threatened to engulf him. Verity had always controlled his dreams.'
Hallam Foe
(Page 41)
Ugh.
Just...
Ugh.
It rarely happens that i love the movie more than the book but in the case of Hallam Foe, i'm all about the filmic adaptation.
The book is jarringly tedious.
The eponymous hero is unlikeable in almost all respects.
Not because he's bad - a little...a lot unhinged - but because he's so despondent and remote there's no way of a connection being formed between the reader and character.
He just sucks.
The story starts well, almost exactly as it plays out in the movie but devolves into a petty series of vendettas acted out by a man-child.
I think i sighed internally a few thousand times before i reached the story's cop out of a conclusion.
I didn't need or want to necessarily like Master Foe but i wanted to feel something other than acute irritation.
I repeat.
Ugh.
I can't remember being this disappointed in a book in a long time.
Perhaps i'm being unfair because i have so much adoration for the film but Peter Jink's story seemed such a royal mess and lacked any of the wonder David Mackenzie managed to instil within his adaptation.
Whilst reading the book i felt only a minute amount of empathy for the damaged Hallam, whereas watching Jamie Bell masterfully fumble his way through the awkwardness of being socially handicapped was a pleasure to observe and i rooted for his version of Hallam until the last scene was played out.
I hoped at some stage before i turned the last page this feeling would reoccur but alas, no.
I think i'm going to have to watch the movie tonight just so i can erase the original Hallam from my memory banks and remember why i fell in love with the movie in the first place.
Hrumph.
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